>In article <44mhpn$etu at ralph.vnet.net>, olee at ripco.com (O. Lee) writes:
>|> I have 8MB RAM with a ram doubler (~16MB).
>
>Never heard of such a thing, what does it do ?
>(same thing as stacker but for RAM?)
>Where can it be obtained ? Experiences ?
RAMDoubler has been available on the Macintosh for a few years and recently
made the leap to Windows. I've been using it on several Macs, and am quite
pleased with it there. I've no experience with it under Windows.
What it does is look for code and data segments in RAM which have not been
accessed in a while, and it compresses them. If this compression is not
enough to achieve the necessary doubling of apparent RAM, it makes up the
rest with disk space. On the Mac, it is quite transparent and apparently
rock solid. My Macintosh, which has 20 MB of real RAM, acts as though it
has 40 MB.
There are some limitations, however. It works best when there are several
programs contending for the available RAM instead of one big program. This
is because with one big program, there are less likely to be unused code
and data areas in RAM which can be compressed, so it has to use disk space,
which is much slower. I find that with 20 MB of real RAM, I can run Mma, an
X-server (MacX), TeX (Textures), Eudora and several useful utilities all at
the same time, giving each generous helpings of RAM, and still don't hit
the hard drive much.
Lee Larson <<< lmlars01 at homer.louisville.edu >>> (502)852-6826
Department of Mathematics, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292